THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Sunday, July 3, 2016

It was sometime in the 1980s, when Dale Poffenroth was just getting started as girls basketball coach at Central Valley High in Spokane Valley.

The clinic was somewhere in Oregon.

During a break, Poffenroth stepped out, and there, sitting at a table, was Pat Summitt.

Yes, that Pat Summitt.

“She said ‘Hi’ and I spoke to her and sat down for a minute and we started talking basketball,” Poffenroth said.

“It was just natural,” he recalled of talking to Summitt, who died last week at age 64, five years after being diagnosed with early onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type.

POFFENROTH, WHO retired in March after coaching 12 years at Coeur d’Alene High following 17 years at Central Valley, chatted with Summitt a few more times after that, at various clinics, as well at the Women’s Final Four in Tacoma in 1989.

“She was just easy to visit with,” Poffenroth said. “I know my assistant at the time, Judy Walters, she liked her so much she went back there and worked a couple of her camps, paid her own way to get to Tennessee. (She) actually lost money, because they give you a few dollars to run the camp, but by the time you buy a plane ticket to Tennessee and back ... but she just liked what she learned, liked being around her, the atmosphere there.”

Asked what impact Summitt, who coached Tennessee for 38 seasons, had on women’s basketball, Poffenroth echoed others’ myriad tributes to her in the past week.

“She simply showed that women can play a sport without being looked upon as being frail,” he said. “Because when she first started, basketball was the old Iowa thing, where it was 3-on-3 on each end and you couldn’t cross halfcourt and you could only take two dribbles and you had to stop and pass the ball to somebody. ... And then it was proven that women could, without hurting themselves, run up and down the floor, and she showed young women they can succeed if they work hard, because I’ll tell you, if you played for her, you did work hard. There was no question about that. Hard work leads to success, and that’s where she came from.

“I think that’s what she gave to basketball — It doesn’t matter what gender you are, if you work hard at what you’re doing, you can be successful.”

OK, SO just so you don’t get the impression Poffenroth had Summitt on speed dial ...

“I never picked up the phone and dialed her up and said, ‘Hey, Pat, how ’ya doing?’, which I’ve done to Charli Turner (Thorne) and Kelly Graves and some other people, but ... ” he clarified.

Summitt signed Angie Bjorklund out of University High in Spokane Valley, recruited some other top players in the area, and even brought her Lady Vols to Gonzaga for a game in 2008.

“The only kid I had (at Central Valley) that she really recruited heavily was Emily Westerberg,” Poffenroth said. Westerberg ended up going to play for Thorne at Arizona State along with her good friend, Aubree Johnson from Post Falls High.

Poffenroth likened Summitt to the late Linda Sheridan, the former Shadle Park volleyball and girls basketball coach, who had a fierce desire to win, but if a fellow coach needed help, she would be one of the first people there.

“Pretty intense lady,” Poffenroth said of Summitt, “but still friendly, congenial when it came to talking to her players when they needed something. There was a different side of the lady and that’s the side I saw at clinics.”

Looking back at his first, chance meeting with Summitt, Poffenroth said it was pretty flattering to sit down and talk basketball with a legend like that, and be asked what, as a young coach, he knew about certain aspects of the game.

“I’m not sure what I knew that she didn’t already know, but ... ” he said.

Poffenroth said one thing that impressed him about Summitt was her ability to remember coaches like him from clinic to clinic, from year to year. There were dozens or hundreds of coaches for her to remember; they only had to remember one. Being able to remember, say, the parents of players had to help her in recruiting, Poffenroth said. And he said her ability to change with the times helped her maintain her success over the years.

“She just gave a lot to the sport; I don’t know if there’s anyone else that’s given that much to their sport ... John Wooden, perhaps,” Poffenroth said. “What Pat’s given to basketball — not just women’s basketball — if you do work hard, you can succeed. I think that’s her whole philosophy.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.